Oh, speaking of space, place and refugee subjectivity, I forgot to post that Phase 2 of the Parramappa project — a “refugee psychogeography” mapping project I devised with mainly Afghan young people — went online last month. We just wandered around for an afternoon and took more photos and wrote little stories about the local area. My biggest disappointment was not having time to visit the car yards on Parramatta Rd, because Seher, one of the young Afghan girls involved in the project, was obsessed with Holden Monaros. Thankfully, we were able to instead indulge her lust for Bollywood stars, and thus the interactive map is marked significantly with a kind of cross-cultural, regional-diasporic, pop-inflected affect. (I actually gauge the success of projects like these on such “trivial asides”.) Interestingly, Seher is one of several Afghan girls I know who are obsessed with cars. Mz_blu_eyez, one of the Storybox people, saw Angelina Jolie in Gone in Sixty Seconds as her role model — she even looked uncannily like Angelina. When she wasn’t writing abusive comments on neocon Islamophobe Daniel Pipes’ website, all she would talk about was Ferraris. (And of course, whenever I supervise our after-school new media drop-in space, the kids are guaranteed to be doing their driver knowledge tests online.)
UPDATE: I’ve just realised that this is blog entry #411. Informatica! (And better than a blog birthday!)
[ tags: refugees, psychogeography, maps, mapping, parramatta, bollywood, affect, pop, cars, afghan, angelina-jolie, driving, new-media ]
sweet! i should have a pretty straightforward article coming out soon in the usyd postgrad journal philament on the failure of the pontiac gto (aka monaro) in the states. Maybe Seher could read it for me as I would like some feedback from enthusiasts (a different kind of referee!!). I would really appreciate it!